Mike: Clean coal is expensive. Clean coal makes you go out of your way to burn the stuff. Clean coal, this is one of these stupid things that John McCain was droning on about. The only way clean coal ever works is if you subsidize it, Governor Romney. It doesn’t work in a free market. It’s ineffective. It’s too damn expensive, and it’s too difficult to build the plants. And we have all the renewables. Look, I’m ambivalent about the energy source. I am. I don’t care. As long as the market is determining it. No damn subsidies for anyone or anything. You’re not getting a subsidy for an amoeba fart. You’re not getting a subsidy for a stupid solar panel. You’re certainly not getting a subsidy to improve upon something the Dutch invented in the 13th Century. So no.

How about you stop confiscating private property? How about stop pretending like you own private property, federal government, state government? How about just letting people own their own property? How about you remove these confiscate for non-payment of taxes laws? That’s what Ron Paul was talking about when he said we don’t have real private property rights. This was the bulwark, the bedrock, the foundation of Debra Medina’s campaign in Texas, was you people in Texas don’t have real private property rights because, if you don’t pay your property taxes, they will take your property and sell it. They’ll take their share of the taxes, the Mafia will take their cut, the Texas legislature, and then they’ll let you keep the rest of it after they penalize you for it, of course.

You know what, I’m just a little tired of this. I am tired of listening to these people argue on about government. I’m tired of hearing about how, what about this and what about that? Why don’t we just err on the side of liberty, hmm? Why don’t we just err on the side of, you know what, government probably shouldn’t get involved in that. Why don’t we just err on the side of private property, intellectual private property rights? Why don’t we just err on the side of, you know what, if a corporation, if an individual, if a company, if anyone can do this thing, then the government probably shouldn’t be in the business of trying to do it. I don’t care what it is – license plates, drivers’ license, you name it – the idea that the state is our master and that only through government can we accomplish anything and that we’re a bunch of worthless saps.

When it comes to being human beings, if we don’t have government to guide us, we don’t have government to stick a pinky inside of our nostrils and drag us about like we’re a bunch of three year olds, it’s ridiculous. And some of us resent it, and we’re tired of it. And we’re tired of you sheeple out there that go along with this stuff, “Oh, we need an energy policy.” No, you don’t, you need a free market, dammit. A free market is an energy policy, you imbecile. Get this through your head. The energy policy we’ve had for the last 30 years is what creates the boom and the bubble. How much energy has the Department of Energy actually created? Let me answer that: [Clip] Zero point zero.

Mike: I have had it. You should have had it with this. The only answer that I want from these fools, from these men that want to be the next president, the only answer that I want is let the market do it. I said this yesterday. Yesterday’s monologue, yesterday’s transcript is about this. We have tried everything other than republicanism. We have tried everything. We’ve tried every approach you nitwits have thrown at us. We’ve tried Keynesianism. We’ve tried Milton Friedman monetarism. We’ve tried the government managing it this way – this and that and the other. The only thing that we haven’t given a try in the 20th Century is letting the market do it. And I don’t mean a regulated market. I mean a market that is governed by hard currency – gold, silver. Not fiat currency. Actually capital. I mean a government, a market that is not taxed, that doesn’t tax, punish, and penalize people for success.

We don’t need any – I heard one of those candidates droning on last night about tax policy, oh, we need to change the corporate tax policy. We need to eliminate the damn corporate tax. It’s a double tax anyways. They don’t pay it. They pass most of it, if not all of it, off to you. 3.5 percent is the number I want you to remember. 3.5 percent, ladies and gentlemen. What does that mean? “Mike, what’s that number?” 3.5 percent, that’s about what the feds spent from 1789 all the way until 1931, 3 percent of GDP. 3 percent. Not 30 percent, not 23 percent, not 13 percent. All the way up until we decided to become the world’s policemen. All the way up until the time that we were allowing government and experts to fix everything.

Well, the damn experts have screwed it up. They need to get the hell out of the way. This is why you must decentralize this monster, to defang it. I don’t believe that it can be decentralized, so we have to break it up into its constituent parts.

Books related to this topic of this essay may be found in The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore. This is a revised transcript from The Mike Church Show.

While I’m not as libertarian as he is, I’d hold that the right to use land is basic to all other rights; and I stop short of calling myself a communitarian because if communities control the use of land, we need their permission to exercise right on our land; and so instead of rights they become privileges.

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The conservative is concerned, first of all, with the regeneration of the spirit and character—with the perennial problem of the inner order of the soul, the restoration of the ethical understanding, and the religious sanction upon which any life worth living is founded. This is conservatism at its highest. - Russell Kirk